That's what I use at the moment but it would be nice to combine them and to be more easily able to lock off when rapping to clean holds on projects. It seems to make more sense to pull downwards when rapping, rather than pushing up as with the Smart Alpine.

I doubt it for several reasons, the first being it won´t take a 9-10mm single rope.

The Mega Jul is supposed to take 7.8 to 10.5mm ropes. (See video, about 20 seconds in.)

I know but the video is captioned MicroJul.

We shall see how good the MagaJul is in practice, paying out slack is something one would have to get used to and nowhere near as easy as a normal plate. The ropes themselves look horrific in real life, I´ve boot laces thicker than that!

My TRE's all wore out. I think the UP is as good, although it works on a different principle. The UP is bulkier although probably not heavier (weight is about the same as a Grigri). You can use it in a friction mode as well as an assisted locking mode, and can belay the second off the anchor with it too.

The main competition is the Mammut Alpine Smart, which is lighter and a lot cheaper (except that you'd have to buy two Smarts to cover the range of one UP). Many people seem to like it.

For half ropes, which require near-simultaneous paying out and taking in to be effective, I think the UP beats the Smart hands-down. For singles or twins, there is less of an advantage, but for all ropes I find that the UP feeds out for clips and leader motions better than any other device on the market, including all the tubes.

I haven't tried the Edelrid gadgets, but I can see how they work and aren't interested. It is highly unlikely they will compete with the UP in rope handling ease for half ropes.

I think that peak load concerns notwithstanding, assisted braking is probably the wave of the future. Unless you are careful to buy and use a range of tube-style devices, there is a decent chance you'll pair a tube with a thin rope or ropes for which the tube's friction is inadequate.

Over the past couple of climbing seasons, I have been integrating into my trad multipitch technique various approaches aiming to eliminate the possibility of the leader falling directly on a mid-route trad belay or to severely limit the impact of such a fall.

Lock-assist devices that are compatible with half ropes peak my interest because of their potential application with one of those "no-FF2" approaches, which simply consists of placing and clipping the first couple of progression pros of the next pitch at arm's length from the previous pros. Of course, this requires good pro options in relatively close proximity above the belay (and when that condition is not met, another "no-FF2" approach must be used). With this approach, the belayer must keep the leader secured on the previous pro at the same time as he pays out a bunch of slack for the next clip.

The only decent practical solution I’ve found for this is to use two ropes and have the belayer hold tight on the one clipped into the previous pro while paying out slack on the other for the clipping of the next pro. Since I'm between half-ropes these days, I use 5m of dynamic 8mm in order to have the double rope technique with my single rope for the beginning of the pitch.

This may be well-known to some but it took me a little while to work it out: the only way to consistently allow the clipping rope to be paid out easily is to ensure that the held rope does not pull the ATC tight against its biner. I've found that the ATC Guide and Reverso3&4 work well for this because you can keep the device separated from its biner by gently pushing up against the small cord ring just under the "V" notches with the thumb of the hand holding the locked-off rope as shown. The ATC-XP, Verso and other units of this type work not too badly either because the thumb can push against the underside of the V notches. However, with the regular ATC, it’s much trickier and there’s a high risk of getting fingers pinched between the device and its biner if the leader falls.

(LATE EDIT: PHOTO REMOVED TO AVOID CONFUSING. AS DISCUSSED LATER IN THE THREAD - SEE POST No 29, THE TECHNIQUE SHOWN DOES NOT WORK FOR CERTAIN LOW PROBABILITY/HIGH RISK SITUATIONS AND SHOULD NOT BE USED)

The Smart Alpine seems to work well for this too. I’ve only had the opportunity to try it in the store but the unlocking hook at the front end does seem to allow using a single hand to both hold one rope tight and keep the device loose, leaving the other hand free to pay out slack. In this case, it’s even more important to keep the device loose since allowing it to jam against the biner completely locks both ropes (and that's the whole point of the device). Of course, if the leader falls before completing the clip, the belayer must stop pushing up/out against the device to be able to arrest him but that’s an easy reflex to have since you simply revert to holding down the braking rope in the usual manner.

I like the lock-assist feature of the Smart Alpine for the extra safety in case of belayer distraction (or loss of consciousness) but, with the "no-FF2" approaches I use now, the need for lock-assist does not seem so urgent and I find the Smart Alpine a bit heavy (at 125 g) and quite bulky for trad multipitches. Rgold mentioned that the Alpine Up does better than anything else at (near) simultaneous taking in and paying out of half ropes (so, presumably, also at simultaneously holding securely and paying out). This sounds very interesting but this unit seems way too heavy (175g) and bulky for trad multipitches.

This new Edelrid device looks like it should work OK for the two-rope simultaneous hold and pay out manipulation. I’d love to try it out but have not seen it anywhere yet (plus I'm quite puzzled that neither the device nor that super-skinny rope it's supposed to go with show up on the Edelrid website).

You have vastly overcomplicated the issue. You just pay out the clipping rope as required and at the same time be prepared to lock off as required, exactly as you would all the rest of the time when the leader is climbing. The MicroJul is scheduled for delivery as a rope/device set in middle March and doesn´t appear in the Edelrid product list. Whether it is to be sold seperately is not clear as the only company who advertise the rope set for pre-order do not offer the plate without the ropes.

Paying out slack on the clipping rope while sliding your brake hand up the holding rope amounts to doing exactly what we keep drilling into beginners never to do: never let go of your brake hand's hold on the rope and slide it up.

Keeping hold of the both ropes while pulling out slack through the device only on the clipping rope puts a bunch of slack on the braking side of the holding rope. In case of a fall, the belayer will snap that slack down tight again but probably not before some gets sucked through the device.

The approach most people use is probably more like finding a way to wrap your braking hand around both the holding and clipping ropes so that you can tighten your grip around either one in turn while letting the other one slide through and position that hand in some intermediate position that is both a) high/out enough to allow the clipping rope to slide through the braking hand and the device without snapping the latter tight against its biner, and b) low enough that you can quickly bring down the braking end of the holding rope to arrest a fall.

I've no doubt that this works well enough for most people, especially as you get to know your own ropes of identical make and diameter. For my part, I've played around with this latter option a fair bit with other partners' half ropes, with my own older half ropes (mismatched: same size but different makes and with very different suppleness and sliding characteristics) and, finally, in the context of alternately clipping/holding my 10.3 mm single rope and the short 8mm additional rope I occasionally use for two-rope leading/belaying of the beginning of a mid-route pitch. I've found this approach to be, at best, a compromise that does not hold the holding rope as securely as it might while still ending up with occasional situations when the device will snap tight on its own and you have to jostle it to be able to resume paying out slack.

In my experience, the approach I've settled on and described above is both consistently secure and less unpredictable with the paying out. I make no apology for the overcomplication. I did not describe it to try and convince people to switch to it but to explain where I come from in evaluating belay devices in hope of finding a locking-assist one that is both light, functional and not too cumbersome.

I certainly don't claim to know all the tricks in the bag but, for my first 10 years of climbing starting in the early 80s, I was belaying trad leaders and trad seconds on nothing but munter hitches and still use that option in preference to any device for bringing up seconds that may require a tight rope, need to downclimb or be lowered, etc.

Paying out slack on the clipping rope while sliding your brake hand up the holding rope amounts to doing exactly what we keep drilling into beginners never to do: never let go of your brake hand's hold on the rope and slide it up.

Not sure exactly what you mean here. What you should never do is take your brake hand off the rope (which is precisely what you are doing in your pic). As for sliding your brake hand - how you got the idea that you should never do that, I have no idea. Perhaps from one of these silly 5-part belay techniques that is supposed to be "safer" than the pinch and slide? Anyway, sliding your brake hand on the rope is completely fine.

In reply to:

The approach most people use is probably more like finding a way to wrap your braking hand around both the holding and clipping ropes so that you can tighten your grip around either one in turn while letting the other one slide through and position that hand in some intermediate position that is both a) high/out enough to allow the clipping rope to slide through the braking hand and the device without snapping the latter tight against its biner, and b) low enough that you can quickly bring down the braking end of the holding rope to arrest a fall.

More or less, yes. Although what you're missing is that the ropes on the brake side are split in the hand. You use two fingers for the right rope, and two for the left, and one rope runs between a couple of fingers.

Despite your protestations to the contrary, I can assure you that this technique works perfectly even on mismatched doubles. For a few years I used one single and one half rope, (8.4 and 9.7 IIRC) and never had any difficulty feeding out one while holding the other.

Please don't take this the wrong way, but it sounds like you could stand to spend a few minutes getting showed how to belay with doubles. I only say this because describing this method is much harder than showing it.

By the way, I think you may have a much more serious problem on your hands than a slightly unorthodox method of feeding slack, and that is using one 8mm and one 10.3, where the high fall-factor fall right off the belay is always expected to hit the skinny rope. The difference in diameter is so large that I would be really suspicious that you could hold a hard high-fall-factor fall right off the belay on the 8mm rope, like you're planning on doing. No matter how hard you clamp down, the big rope is going to be holding the belay device away from the small rope. It will start 2.3mm away, and only after it compresses 2.3mm will it begin to put friction on the small rope - the one that's doing the catching. 2.3mm is a lot of compression. And since the big rope will not be taking any load in the way you do it, it will not be stretched like the small one will be. So the relative difference between rope sizes will be even more.

Are you sure (as in, have you tried it by dropping a bag of rocks or something) that your setup actually works? It's hard enough to hold a hard fall with an 8mm rope in the first place, but holding one where the device can't fully clamp down on the rope - well, I would absolutely refuse to accept a belay from you using that technique until you'd verified that you could really control that fall.

I just realized that you really are locking off one rope and completely letting go of the other for every clip. I take back what I said earlier - I was minimizing your technique by calling it slightly unorthodox. Your technique is absolutely unsafe. You should be prepared to catch a fall on either those ropes at any time.

What if the climber leaves your belay, and early in the pitch, falls while pulling slack to clip a piece, and the small intermediate last piece he placed rips? You have no hand on the brake rope that's supposed to catch him on his last piece. And what's worse, if the one hand you do have on happens to be on the small rope (50/50 chance) I have very serious doubts that you'll ever be able to control the belay again.

Is there another method than pinch and slide? If so I don´t teach it. As you say, shuffling the ropes seperated by a couple of fingers has been the method for all of my climbing career since double ropes came into fashion and is for all trad climbers I know. And yes, a belayer that lets go of one of the ropes is death on a stick.